Technology and Ethics

Class: PHIL-282

Notes:

Technology and Ethics: An Overview of Research

1. Introduction and Scope of Research

• Definition: Research investigates how technologies (human-made physical entities, tools, artifacts) directly or indirectly affect voluntary human behaviour.
• Scope: Ranges from a single tool in a practice to kinds of technologies, systems, and technology in general.
• Types of Studies:
  • Descriptive: Focuses on production/use of technologies, behaviour in technological settings (e.g., battlefield engagement), and beliefs/motivations about artifacts. Often incorporates anthropological, sociological, and psychological research.
  • Normative: Explores right ways to fabricate things, morality of production/use, moral status of technological entities, and technology's role in a meaningful life.
• Historical Context: Overview focuses on research since the mid-twentieth century, though tool-making and reflection span millions of years. Modern technology, powered by natural energy and utilizing science/engineering, began around 1500 in the West.

2. How Technology Mediates Ethics and Politics

• Mediation: Artifacts stand between and transform humans and their worlds in two ways:
  • Extending Powers: Technologies amplify our ability to act (e.g., hammers, drones).
  • Transforming Experiences: Technologies mediate how we experience people, objects, and environment (e.g., mobile phones, telescopes, thermometers, virtual reality).
• Beyond Mediation: Technologies can radically change actions and experiences, altering the expression of human nature (e.g., sanitation increasing life spans) and even creating perceptions (e.g., media technologies). Tool making is simultaneously human and world making.
• Technosocial Collective: Calls into question framing ethical questions for abstract individuals. Right action depends on technological skills and tools. Modern technology involves collaborative production, affects people over time (infrastructure), and connects masses in networks. Ethics must consider this technosocial milieu.
• Political Dimension: Societies are groups with stable complexes of behaviours, artifacts, ideas, but are dynamic.
• Cultural Lag: Since the Industrial Revolution, technological changes have accelerated, exceeding society's ability to respond.
  • William Fielding Ogburn (1920s): Coined "cultural lag".
  • Henri Bergson (1932): Argued modern technological progress requires a "cultural supplement of soul" to prevent humans from being overwhelmed.
  • Consequences: At best, social changes catch up (e.g., traffic laws for automobiles); at worst, technological power becomes ungoverned, leading to exploitation (workers, environment) or data capture for private benefit.
• Societal Research Aim: To conduct moral reflection and analysis on this process: what artifacts to create, who should access them, how they should be used, and how societies should adjust.

3. General Ethical Appraisals of Modern Technology

• Technological Optimists:
  • Believe life is better with more technology.
  • Point to increased wealth, health, and longevity due to technological productivity and medical improvements.
  • Problems are seen as temporary, solvable through updates, social adaptation, policy changes, or new innovations.
• Technological Pessimists:
  • Believe advancing technology has decreased human life quality beyond a certain point.
  • Concerns include environmental issues (climate change), degradation of relationships/experiences, psychological angst, and uncertainty.
  • Suggest side effects of technology are worse than the problems they aim to solve.
• Technological Realists (Intermediate):
  • Acknowledge enormous benefits that cannot be abandoned, alongside formidable problems that are difficult to address.
  • May lean towards technological determinism (ineluctable power of technology formations) or social constructivism (hopeful opportunities for social transformation).

4. Theories of Technological Mediation (Classical Philosophy of Technology)

• José Ortega y Gasset (1939): Modern technology increases what can be done without corresponding enhancement of ideals about what should be done, decoupling power from moral constraints.
• Martin Heidegger (1954): Modern scientific knowledge adopts an attitude of "challenge or domination" (Gestell/enframing), reducing the world to a "resource or standing reserve" (Bestand) for manipulation.
• Jacques Ellul (1954): Technological advance led to devaluation of uniqueness, beauty, skill, in favor of predictable, rational efficiency ("la technique") in all human activities.
• Herbert Marcuse (1964): Advanced industrialism generates "false needs" and social control via mass media and industrial management, limiting autonomy and freedom.
• Ivan Illich (1973) – Technological Counter-Productivity: The pursuit of technological interventions can ultimately result in the opposite of their original aim (e.g., automobiles, when all direct, indirect, and externalized costs are considered, offer only marginally faster travel than walking).
• Other Critiques: Langdon Winner's "technics-out-of-control," Lewis Mumford's "megatechnics," and early STS studies highlighted general threats to human autonomy, dignity, and democracy.
• Hans Jonas (1984) – Imperative of Responsibility:
  • Technological advances amplify human action's power, duration, and scale, making previous ethical theories obsolete.
  • With the power to alter environment and human being (even to annihilation), a new moral imperative is needed: "act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life".
  • Requires humility rooted in our limitations to control or anticipate ultimate effects, dubbed a "heuristics of fear".
• Albert Borgmann (1984) – Technological Devices:
  • Analyzed how "technological devices" alter human activities, abilities, and relationships.
  • Devices (mass-produced, replaceable, context-less, e.g., iPod) displace non-commoditized artifacts that require skill and attentiveness in "focal practices" (e.g., original oil painting, running on a mountain trail vs. treadmill).
  • Spurred collaborations on technology and the good life, well-being, quality of life, and happiness.

5. Contemporary Research

• Shift from General Critique: Much current research forsakes general critique for particularized investigations into specific technologies, kinds of technology, or practices.
• Mid-level Principles: Popularized by Beauchamp and Childress (biomedical ethics), these are positioned between common morality and ethical theory, compatible with virtue, deontological, and utilitarian ethics.
  • Examples: autonomy, justice, sustainability, professional responsibility, privacy, risk management.
• "Empirical Turn" (early 21st century):
  • Shift from classical philosophy of technology to analysis focusing on: (1) design, development, and production (not just use); (2) local rather than global scope; (3) empirical case studies informed by sociology, psychology, anthropology.
  • Emphasizes richer descriptive analysis, sometimes at the expense of normative theory.
  • Phenomenological Approaches (Verbeek, 2011): User-and-artifact are considered a hybrid entity, transforming agents and their possibilities/obligations (e.g., microwaves change food, cooking, social relations).
  • Anticipatory Ethics for Public Policy (Brey, 2010, 2012, 2016): Analyses emerging technologies at three levels: general features, expected artifacts/processes, and use contexts.
• Science and Technology Studies (STS) Practitioners:
  • Craft narratives explaining economic, political, historical, and cultural factors in scientific/technological states of affairs.
  • Reject classical philosophy's concerns, detailing how technologies are socially constructed and simultaneously socially construct their makers/users.
  • Contrasts with technological determinism (technology follows a natural path resistant to human intervention).
• Professionalization of Technology Assessment (Grunwald, 2019):
  • Addresses the Collingridge dilemma: when design change is easy, the need isn't foreseen; when the need is apparent, change is difficult/expensive.
  • Midstream modulation: Incorporates social considerations into research and development processes, involving scientists, engineers, and non-traditional stakeholders.
• Virtue Ethics Approach (Vallor, 2016):
  • Synthesizes Western (Aristotle) and Eastern (Confucius, Buddha) virtue ethics to develop "technomoral virtues" for living well with emerging technologies.
  • Chinese philosophers (e.g., Peimen Ni) also explore Confucian contributions.
• Overlap with Applied Ethics:
  • Specialized discourses like medical, environmental, bioethics, computer, engineering, research, and media ethics emerged due to technological complications.
  • Also specialized lines for bioengineering, robotics, drones, AI, nanotechnology, etc..
  • Often apply traditional consequentialist, deontological, or virtue ethics, or use case-based approaches/mid-level principles.
  • Frequently relegate broader social concerns and treat technology as a neutral tool.
• Role of Engineers:
  • Historically overlooked in ethics discourse.
  • Engineering ethics (microethics) emphasized non-maleficence (health, safety, welfare) and client/employer/peer relationships.
  • Since the 1990s, broadened to "macroethics" (social and environmental effects of engineering).
  • Further broadened by the philosophy of engineering.
• Cross-cutting Mid-level Principles:
  • Concerns about risk and safety are prominent across disciplines (nuclear, medical, engineering ethics).
  • Critical quantitative risk assessment (Shrader-Frechette) focuses on determining and accepting risk under uncertainty.
  • Ethics of risk (Hansson) distinguishes human-caused risks from 'natural' risks.
• Synthesizing General Ethics for Technologies:
  • Efforts to collect methods and approaches covering sustainability, justice, professional responsibility, privacy, risk, value-sensitive design (Hansson, 2017).
  • Geometric analysis (Peterson, 2017) integrates cost-benefit, precaution, sustainability, autonomy, and justice principles.

6. Future Directions

• Challenges: Predicting future directions is difficult due to lack of overarching governance, increasing philosophical pluralism, and social instability from new technologies.
• Sector-Specific Trends: Guidance may come from trends in specific technological sectors (manufacturing, transport, communication, medicine, computers, energy, military, consumer goods).
• Ethical Lags: Increased computing power, data collection, and analytic capabilities will create further ethical lags in privacy, surveillance, personal freedom, cybersecurity, propaganda, marketing, and cultural identity.
• Social Fragmentation:
  • Tensions between "techno-cognitive elites" and others may lead to class antagonism.
  • Profound cultural/social disruptions from emergent and convergent technologies (biorobotics, augmented reality, NBIC – nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, cognitive science) aimed at augmenting human performance and shaping evolution.
  • Amplified social effects include increased income disparity despite poverty alleviation, debates over geoengineering, weakened geographical/spatial/temporal continuities, and fragmentation of shared culture/consensus.
  • Technological and political power will increasingly align, threatening classical liberalism.
• Roles for Researchers and Policymakers:
  • STS research can explain complex technological developments.
  • "Empirical turn" researchers and mid/upstream modulators can accompany new developments for better social outcomes.
  • Policymakers must attempt to govern/guide technologies to meet societal needs effectively.
• Continuing Appraisals: Techno-optimism and techno-pessimism will likely continue to flourish.
• Bridging the Gap: A key task for researchers is to fuse local (specific technologies/practices) with global (overall changes to individual/social existences), integrating the specific with the general, past with future, to encourage thoughtful consideration of technologies that shape humanity.